Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for language.
I don't believe in time. Ok not really, I believe in time, but I don't believe it's as linear as people usually assume it is. Time is fluid. For example, take a thing...take a book, or some other piece of literature, and tell me when it was created. Don't actually tell me; I can't hear you. My point being, even if you kind of know, where did you measure from? When its author started it, or finished it, or some point in the middle when it started to take on its most prominent, current characteristics? Or before all that when the idea of it was first conceived? All these options and an infinity in between means that that book, or play, or cook book whatever doesn't actually have an age, not a real one. And if it doesn't have an age, does it even exist?
Ok, yes, but just shut up for a second and appreciate this beautiful philosophical gem I've gifted to you for one second. Or don't, whatever it's not my deal.
I don’t know; I’m just trying to make myself semi-relatable, just so we get off to some semblance of a smooth start. The point is moot now, anyway, so just forget I said anything.
Once there was an ugly future-city (or present-city if you’re reading this between 2700 and 3000 (or past-city if you’re reading this after that)) called Duckville. It wasn’t named after an abundance of ducks, like a lot of uninformed citizens assumed it was; it was actually named after a woman, Lucinda Duck, who founded it and then was promptly put to death because women weren’t allowed to do things back then, also ye ol’ citizens of Duckville were, quote, “pretty sure she [was] a witch,” so, burn her I guess.
No worries though, Lucinda eventually got her dues in the form of a brown park full of bums and a statue covered in bird feces, also the current mayor of Duckville went back in time and made the men that burned Miss. Duck write her a very sincere apology.
Anyway, Duckville is a pretty normal future-city (/present-city/past-city), except that it does, weirdly, have a high goose-count, and they’re all huge for some reason, probably pollution, experts agree. Pollution is still a problem believe it or not. Damn polar bears need to toughen up.
Back to the ways Duckville is normal, let’s count them, shall we?
There’s smog enough to raise the cancer rate of its citizens; cancer’s been cured of course, so it’s not as bad as it sounds, but the pills are pretty big and inconvenient, so there’s that.
The homeless people are numerous and pretentious, and the poverty rate is higher than the literacy rate, but no one cares because they’d rather eat than read anyway.
People who aren’t addicted to drugs, prescription or otherwise, are sent to rehab.
Prison is safer and cleaner than the outside world.
Challenging the government is commonplace, but challenging the government for something legitimate is punishable by death.
And lastly, genetic engineering is so effective that people don’t even need to have sex anymore; they do anyway.
That's seven ways I believe.
About genetic engineering, that always gets a little messy, there’s a lot of it in Duckville. So much that it’s got its own lingo. A “viper” is a person who’s created entirely with science; they are parentless, raceless, emotionless, heartless monsters who are better at everything than humans are. Well, that’s not completely true; they need to have hearts to survive, so they aren’t heartless, but essentially they’re organic robots.
Everyone is completely, piss-their-pants terrified of vipers, so "why are they still being created?" you ask? Well, because the very first set of vipers, about 50 of which 37 survived to adulthood, used their rainbow of man-made attributes, intelligence, physical beauty, charm, wit, etc., to sue for the rights to their own lives. They didn't stop there, and to be fair why the hell would they?
Those 37 vipers worked together to form the OPVI, or the "Organization for the Protection of Viper Integrity," whose duties include, but aren't limited to, the creation of new vipers and development of viper technology, the founding of viper-exclusive private schools, the widening of the rich/poor gap and the destruction of the middle class, the privatization of the government, the dehumanization of humans, and so on.
Humans of course retaliated with an OPHI, "Organization for the Protection of Human Integrity," who mostly just do their best to pass legislature that might stifle the rapidly growing viper population, and to oppress lizards so benefactors perceive progress and continue to benefact. More on lizards later.
There are two kinds of vipers. POE, or “product of experimentation,” vipers are the really dangerous ones. They’re made by bored scientists mostly, who are sitting around in a lab and thinking it’d be sort of cool to create a real werewolf. These experiments never go well, and there are institutions and sanctuaries and orphanages dedicated specifically to the care, sometimes the extermination, of these genetic Frankenstein creatures.
The second kind of viper is an HRA, “human race advancement,” Viper. These are highly-functioning members of society that aren’t allowed to run for office because they are, quote, “too sociopathic.” Usually they just make billions, trillions with the devaluation of the U.S. dollar, from international drug rings, corporations with less moral inclination than those drug rings, or just being their conniving, evil, black-souled selves (assuming, of course, that they have souls).
Another interesting thing, if you thought those last things were interesting in which case you are pretty easily pleased, about vipers is that they don’t last for much longer than three generations. Their DNA starts running out or gets fragmented or something, and no one is positive what causes the increasing frailty down generations like ancient royal families except that genetic engineers call it the Photo Copier Effect. The name references the way a photo copy copied from a photo copy copied from a photo copy (and so forth) will be progressively more faded, and eventually unrecognizable. It’s the same with vipers. As vipers breed with vipers, it’s progressively harder to conceive and pure-bred viper children have weird things wrong with them, like they’re bald or they never grow teeth ect.
It’s theorized that the effect was caused on purpose because scientists/world leaders/the illuminati or something were afraid that vipers would dominate the world eventually unless it was impossible for them to have any strong offspring. No one cares why, they’re just happy the Photo Copier Effect exists.
Then there are humans, but if you’re reading this you probably know what those are.
And finally, the most underrated of the creatures resulting from rampant genetic modifying, there are lizards. Lizards are the bastard offspring of a viper and a human. They are healthier than pure-bred vipers, superior in their skills to humans, completely resistant to the Photo Copier Effect, and brutally oppressed across the entire nation.
Once all human races eventually morphed into one mixture of all of them, people started running out of other people to oppress and blame for a country’s problems nearing election season, so what a perfect opportunity when lizards came along. They were helpless, easy to write off, good targets for the fear-hatred that people actually felt for vipers, and they were all too young to vote when the government started taking their rights away.
Despite horrible living conditions and terrifying crime rates in designated “lizard slums” there aren’t many protests or anything because the world has more-or-less slipped into a grey state of lethargy, even the oppressed parts, so lizards just sort of sit in their garbage districts and only associate with each other. It would be sad, but even they don’t really care about the oppression. It’s more of a media stunt than anything; even if they were allowed to vote, it’s not like any of them would.
So that’s the state of things, and it’s undeniably shitty, but that’s just life, especially if you’re a lizard.
-to be continued...-
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139,408 Literary Works • 672,555 Reviews
Hello, lovely!
The first thing I'd like to say is that this is certainly an interesting piece. The parts about Duckville didn't really catch my eye, but they didn't pertain much to the title and thus the perceived topic of the piece, so that was a little confusing, but overall... It was interesting.
Now, to begin my critique. Overall, your tone is very informal and friendly, and has more of a spoken feel than written. However, in cases like this, you have to watch out for certain tics your speaker might have that make it unbearable to read. For myself, I found it difficult to navigate my way through the wandering tangents and asides, as well as your speaker's habit to severely overuse commas. I don't know if you were trying to go for an Adams-esque, Hitchhiker's Guide feel to the piece, or if you were taking bits and pieces and creating your own style of narration, but either way, I found it distracting. I think that stylistically, for me as a reader, it would work much better if you started off with a more formal tone and shorter, more concise sentences, and slowly unravelled the tone into something much more informal. Especially since you're discussing the mechanics and realities of time at the beginning, and that's something that usually feels very dry and scientific to begin with, so the reader might be more open to the story.
I also noticed that you seem to have a habit of spattering commas throughout, no matter if they actually go there. In your first paragraph alone, you have multiple examples - "without carbon dating, or asking someone"; "because that means, I can make up a story" - and I think it would be wise to remember that commas traditionally signify pauses that the reader takes to breathe, and that having too many of them, especially in the wrong places, can leave the reader gasping for breath, or at the very least confused and a little bit lost.
This leads on to another point: your tendency to write run-on sentences. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if your tone is informal; we've all been there, when we're trying to tell a story and one thing leads into another and somehow we've taken three breaths and still haven't gotten around to the end of the subject of the sentence, let alone the verb. However, when someone sits down to read, they generally don't expect to open up a story and be reading run-on sentences almost automatically. Many readers would take one or two attempts at reading your second sentence and then stop reading. This ties into my point from before, where it might be a little different approach that grabs your reader, starting scientifically and ending with your run-ons.
Your second paragraph, attacking the reader, is probably not a very wise move considering they're already likely to stop. Some people do have a history of abuse in their households, or they do have friends who have said very similar things to that paragraph, and some people just plain don't like being called a "little bitch".
A couple of little nitpicks before I wrap this up - "Bible" should always be capitalized, and in your numbered list, you need to have a space after the close-parenthesis. There might be more, but I try not to trawl through for minuscule editing tips; I recommend you ask someone to take a look at your story and see if they notice typos or continuity errors. Especially because this is a shorter piece, every word counts - and every misspelled word counts a lot.
Your piece went off on a giant tangent. We started with the mechanics of time, then headed into Duckville, and then by the end we weren't even talking about Duckville any more. It might be better if you talked about the genetic engineering - because vipers and lizards do sound legitimately interesting - in the context of the beginning of your little tale, such as explaining the Duckville legislature against them, or if you dropped Duckville altogether. Overall, though, this piece is very much a "telling" one over a "showing" one. The speaker is very one-sided, so vipers and lizards all sound like repeats and stereotypes; even in a lethargic world, someone is going to have some kind of idea or energy that sets them apart from the rest. I recommend possibly revising this to sound more like a scientific detail, at least at first, but I also recommend writing an actual story about the lizards or something else in this world, because the reader can't actually see anything you're trying to show them about the future(/present/past).
The piece interests me and intrigues me, to a point, but it doesn't have any super-special pizzazz to grab me as a reader and throw me into this world of the future, or into Duckville or into the lizard slums. Personally, I'd like to see this cleaned up and edited, but I'd like it even more if there was a story surrounding it that would actually get me invested in this idea.
Keep it up!
Thank you for the review! It means a lot. I've been working on this idea for a long time, and it definitely needs some direction. Originally I was thinking this particular part would be like a little prologue, and then I'd add chapters to it(about the lizards I over-ambitiously mentioned in the summary and the title lol), but now I'm a little confused about how to do that on this website, so that is the long-winded reason that the lizards are hardly even mentioned yet... further guidance on this topic would be met with much gratitude lol
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Advice? Well, first of all, my advice would be to treat this more as an aside than a prologue. People are less likely to read stories that read like articles, and more likely to pick up a book that's intriguing from the start - and most prologues aren't really necessary, because they just convey information that can be given in the story proper.
Also, if you're just confused in general about how to navigate the site and add chapters to a pre-existing idea, I'm totally up for helping with that, too. PM me or chatbar me and I can try to help. ^^
Generally I’m leery of rambly openings because they can bore if not handled correctly, since there’s no action and the only hook they have is whether what the narrator is rambling about is interesting or not. So. While personally I found your opening paragraph enjoyable (because 1. it was funny and 2. I’m inclined to like narrators who are weird and dorky about time), you might want to consider that that won’t necessarily hold true for everyone, or even a majority. Getting to the point fast is important for holding interest in the early stages of a story.
By the same token, while the world-building geek in me is rolling around giggling madly at the descriptions of Duckville and how it was founded and so on, it, again, does not have anything in the way of action to propel it forward. Where is your plot? Show it to us. We want it.
“the current mayor of Duckville went back in time and made the men that burned Miss Duck write her a very sincere apology” genuinely made me snort aloud. I think it’s funnier if you leave off the rest of that paragraph, though—you don’t need to hold our hands by explaining the joke, and explaining tends to kill humor.
I had a very strongly negative knee-jerk reaction to seeing a bulleted list in the middle of a narrative. Just. Nnnnnot a fan of the stylistic choice, at all; I think it’s ugly, aesthetically speaking, and there’s no reason you can’t rattle off all these things in a regular paragraph or sequence of paragraphs.
Okay, so I have to ask—WHY does a society with viable genetic engineering and the ability to create test tube babies use that technology solely for making monsters/mutants/miscellaneous living toys on the one hand and criminal psychopaths on the other? That seems like a waste of resources to me. I mean, if you’re going to make a bunch of artificial sociopaths, at least code them to be prosocial and then inculcate them with game theory and utilitarianism as kids. At least that way you’re way less likely to end up with a bunch of crime lords and serial killers and instead have a bunch of amoral people willing to play nice for the most part.
Also, are all vipers just clones or something? Or does the viper population have a very small gene pool as a result of similar genetic engineering? If they’re all genetically siblings, it’d make sense that they’d end up with inbreeding problems, and that’s something that’s plausible since they were all born in test tubes, and it’d also explain why lizards don’t have the photocopier effect since they’d have one set of the usual viper genes and one set of fresh, unique human ones, thus effectively obliterating the inbreeding problem. Unless they went and bred with a viper, I guess.
Anyway.
I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes. It’s an interesting premise (questionable decisions with genetic engineering aside), and I really like the snarky style of narration.
Thank you for the review! I was wondering about how the list would go over, and opted to take it out. Originally I was reading the thing aloud like a speech, so numbering worked better, but on paper I agree, not the best.
Also thank you for bringing my attention to the major plot-hole with the vipers. That's embarrassing that I never even bothered to come up with a motive for anyone creating them at all, so in short, I am on that. Also, the real plot is soon to come, this was more of a set up than anything, because I too enjoy world-building
Also, I'm glad you thought it was funny, that was the fundamental goal